This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Researchers have discovered a way to generate new human neurons from another type of adult cell found in our brains. The discovery, reported in the October 5th issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, is one step toward cell-based therapies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"This work aims at converting cells that are present throughout the brain but themselves are not nerve cells into neurons," said Benedikt Berninger, now at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "The ultimate goal we have in mind is that this may one day enable us to induce such conversion within the brain itself and thus provide a novel strategy for repairing the injured or diseased brain."

The cells that made the leap from one identity to another are known as pericytes. Those cells, found in close association with the blood vessels, are important for keeping the blood-brain barrier intact and have been shown to participate in wound healing in other parts of the body.

"Now, we reason, if we could target these cells and entice them to make nerve cells, we could take advantage of this injury response," Berninger says.

Further testing showed that those newly converted neurons could produce electrical signals and reach out to other neurons, providing evidence that the converted cells could integrate into neural networks.

"While much needs to be learnt about adapting a direct neuronal reprogramming strategy to meaningful repair in vivo, our data provide strong support for the notion that neuronal reprogramming of cells of pericytic origin within the damaged brain may become a viable approach to replace degenerated neurons," the researchers write.

Researchers have discovered a way to generate new human neurons from another type of adult cell found in our brains. The discovery, reported in the October 5th issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, is one step toward cell-based therapies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"This work aims at converting cells that are present throughout the brain but themselves are not nerve cells into neurons," said Benedikt Berninger, now at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "The ultimate goal we have in mind is that this may one day enable us to induce such conversion within the brain itself and thus provide a novel strategy for repairing the injured or diseased brain."

The cells that made the leap from one identity to another are known as pericytes. Those cells, found in close association with the blood vessels, are important for keeping the blood-brain barrier intact and have been shown to participate in wound healing in other parts of the body.

"Now, we reason, if we could target these cells and entice them to make nerve cells, we could take advantage of this injury response," Berninger says.

Further testing showed that those newly converted neurons could produce electrical signals and reach out to other neurons, providing evidence that the converted cells could integrate into neural networks.

"While much needs to be learnt about adapting a direct neuronal reprogramming strategy to meaningful repair in vivo, our data provide strong support for the notion that neuronal reprogramming of cells of pericytic origin within the damaged brain may become a viable approach to replace degenerated neurons," the researchers write.

I think that curing Alzheimers is just as important as curing cancer. Living dead is some scary stuff. Everything about you or your loved one dies, but their body is still there to remind you.

Do you sometimes think you are larger than life? Well here is something to bring you down to size! When we look at our sun every day, we see a small ball of burning gas. But how big is it really? Our sun is actually 93 million miles (150 million kilometres) away from our planet, which in reality means it is gigantic. You can fit a million Earth's inside the sun. Now, that just sounds incredibly huge. But compared to a lot of stars, our sun is actually quite small. The largest star discovered so far is known as VY Canis Majoris, located in the Canis Major constellation. This "Hypergiant" as astronomers call it, is about 4,900 light years from Earth and is visible with a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. This massive star is estimated to be a billion times bigger than our sun, shining 500,000 times as bright. If it were at the center of our solar system, it would reach as far out as Saturn.

We have recently discovered that this supermassive red giant seems to be nearing the end of its life. There have been recordings of giant explosions on the star's surface, causing loops and arcs which spray matter from the star into space. Normally, the star will lose matter. But when these giant explosions occur, "VY CMa" can lose 10 times as much as its normal rate. These explosions have been going on for at least the past 1,000 years, scientists think. When the star finally dies, it will create a supernova, some of the biggest explosions in the universe from what we know. But it is possible that because VY CMa is so big, it will create an even bigger explosion, known only as a Hypernova. Hypernovae can contain and release more energy than 1,000 supernovae and emits massive amounts of gamma rays, which are sent in all directions. The core of the star is so massive, that when it collapses in on itself, it will even crush the neutrons inside. This creates so much power and energy, that nothing but a massive black hole is left behind. Luckily for Earth, we are too far away to be affected by all of this mayhem that VY CMa is going to create at the end of its life.

Few researchers have given credence to claims that samples of dinosaur DNA have survived to the present day, but no one knew just how long it would take for genetic material to fall apart. Now, a study of fossils found in New Zealand is laying the matter to rest — and putting paid to hopes of cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex.

After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate.

Determining that rate has been difficult because it is rare to find large sets of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons. To make matters worse, variable environmental conditions such as temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation alter the speed of the decay process.

But palaeogeneticists led by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, examined 158 DNA-containing leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant birds called moa. The bones, which were between 600 and 8,000 years old, had been recovered from three sites within 5 kilometres of each other, with nearly identical preservation conditions including a temperature of 13.1 ºC. The findings are published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1.

Diminishing returns
By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.

Oh well, we can still have reverse engineered woolly mammoths. I wanna saddle up one and put on some of those cool "300" style spikey tusk things.
My attack mammoth would be the envy of all SE Alaskans.

Evil geniuses, commence drooling. Scientists have figured out how to remotely control a cell’s self-destruction. Magnets that guide the behavior of tiny metal beads can be used to flip on a cell’s death switch, kick-starting the cell’s demolition. The approach might one day be used to kill cancer cells or orchestrate other cellular events without drugs or incisions.

In the past, scientists have explored killing cancer using tiny iron-containing nanoparticles that latch onto malignant cells and heat up when exposed to a magnetic field. In the new work, a bit of protein guides each nanoparticle to death receptor 4, an aptly named handle on the outside of a cell that acts as a molecular doomsday switch. Exposing the cells to a magnetic field makes the nanoparticles clump together. This clumping pulls together the three molecular prongs that make up the switch, activating it and triggering a process that leads to the cell’s demise.

The scientists from Yonsei University in South Korea tried the approach with a dish of colon cancer cells. Within 24 hours, more than half of the cells exposed to the magnetic field were dead, the team reports online October 7 in Nature Materials.

“They’ve identified a major opportunity for magnetic nanoparticles,” says bioengineer Andrew MacKay of the University of Southern California. “This might be a new way to do really targeted therapeutics.”

Figuring out how to target only particular cells is an ongoing problem, though. Death receptor 4 sits on normal cells too, which can also be destroyed via remote-controlled magnetism. When the researchers tested their approach on developing zebra fish, the tails of the exposed fish developed a kink where cells were killed off in a particular area.

It’s not yet clear whether the magnetic field could be directed with such finesse and specificity that it would kill only tumor cells and not nearby healthy cells. Many cancer cells become resistant and stop responding to the protein that normally hits the death switch; such cells also might not respond to the magnetic nanoparticle version, says Courtney Broaddus, a doctor at the University of California, San Francisco who investigates resistance in cancer cells.

“But it’s very intriguing, the potential applications of this technology for remote controlling activities at the cell membrane,” she says.

The researchers are now working on extending the concept to switches on other cells, such as those that stimulate blood vessel growth, says chemist and team member Jinwoo Cheon.